Gaming Weekend: Don’t Bug Me Edition
Another long weekend sees me wrapping up the story portion of Saints Row, getting a bit of multiplayer fun out of Halo 3 and heading back into Cyrodill where I discover that Bethesda’s masterpiece of an RPG hates me and wants me to cry.
It’s Buggy, Baby
Saints Row has been rightly criticized for being riddled with bugs. I encountered quite a few of them during my play through but fortunately none of them ever got so bad that I lost progress during a mission or anything.
But Oblivion, a game that I wouldn’t say is well known for being buggy, has apparently crapped out on me twice now during the Thieves Guild questline such that I cannot proceed in either instance. Which is really annoying because I want to know how it ends, but I’m getting really tired of playing the early missions over and over. In both cases it’s something simple that doesn’t have any obvious glitch like a graphics hiccup (common in Saints Row) but something that is supposed to happen doesn’t or, in the new case from this weekend, something that is supposed to be available is gone.
In this case it is the seal used on some forged documents that you’re supposed to steal out of the guard’s quarters in the Imperial City. Now, I finished the Dark Brotherhood quest with this character and it seems that during that time (it’s been awhile so my memory is fuzzy) I visited this area. Why that has resulted in my inability to find what I’m looking for is beyond me, but locks that are supposed to be tough to pick are easy to open when you have the key so maybe that’s a part of it? It’s hard to tell and that’s a big part of the frustration.
At least with Saints Row I knew I could just reset and things would go back to normal. Here I don’t know that going back to an earlier point would help anything and restarting the game does nothing. Whatever the case, I suppose I should push on through the Shivering Isles instead and maybe come back to this later, but I’m very sad to say that after spending the $30 on it, so far SI hasn’t captured my attention the way the game’s other quests have. I guess crazy people just aren’t that interesting when you yourself are insane.
As for Saints Row, I saw the ending and thought it was a pretty cool way to close out the game. I’m hearing now that they have a sequel planned which picks up where the original left off in a cheesy Hollywood sort of sequel fashion so it lost some of its cool right there. One thing I hope they do is allow you to import your SR character into Saints Row 2 so I don’t have to try to re-make him. But I doubt that will be the case since the graphics and art direction look pretty different from the few screenshots I’ve seen.
Now that I’ve seen the end I went back and tried to wrap up some of the side quests and achievements. The game is not exactly generous with the points, I’ll say that. And I get really frustrated with open-world games that all feel the need to include driving/racing missions. The driving controls in Saints Row are pretty forgiving (especially compared to something like Crackdown or Godfather) but it’s still no fun. If I wanted to play a racing game, I’d put in Forza or PGR, okay? Stuff like the Escort missions I don’t mind where you don’t have a dedicated route to follow but you have a driving-based objective. At least then my wild, careening style of driving is at least not a serious liability. Occasionally, it’s even an asset as I learned from crashing through some dude’s back fence that you can escape a private investigator by veering wildly off of major streets.
Somehow he doesn’t seem inclined to drive through people’s backyards. Which is really his loss.
Double-Kill!
When I picked up Halo 2, I played the multiplayer stuff for quite some time. Far longer than anyone on my friends list did, that’s for sure. But as I played I felt like those who I encountered online were growing more dedicated to it while I was slowly getting bored.
Over the weekend I hooked up with VENOM HD and played some co-op and partied up with him to do some team matches which is when I started realizing that the thing I’d missed most when playing Halo 2 online was that I didn’t have anyone else to play with.
Venom is far superior to me at Halo, there is no question. But we work pretty well together and in our last match of the evening (Multi-Team Slayer) we basically pwned the other guys thanks to a brilliant stretch of mayhem by Venom and a few well-placed Plasma grenades by yours truly. The ability to share the victory in private rather than engage in self-congratulations or stoic indifference cannot be quantified: It is superior in every conceivable way.
The co-op is an improvement over the solo campaign as well, although on Heroic the challenge is remarkably subdued. In my review of the game I noted that playing the game on Normal is like not really playing it at all and that’s how it felt with three-player co-op on Heroic: We took down the same Scarab that I must have worked on alone for over forty-five minutes in less than ten on our first try. Perhaps once Venom has worked through the game once we can try again on Legendary so I can nab those extra points and present ourselves with a challenge.
Very Unlike a Fine Wine
A few other games I tried out over the weekend:
- Superman Returns: As much as I enjoyed the first 30 minutes of this game, the next hour has been rather dull. I’m fighting the same boring robots and occasionally flying around the city. I did find the Bizarro mini-game, but its fun is hampered by the victory conditions which seem to suggest an approach I have yet to discover. I guess I should send it back; I have the requisite 100+ points to consider it a worthy rental (I don’t know where I came up with that figure) but I feel like I want to enjoy this game more I just can’t figure out how.
- Phantasy Star Universe: Few things in video games make me crazier than super-simple “busywork” foes followed by nearly impossible bosses. The regular enemies you fight in this game are really dull and pose little threat but the first boss I met mopped the floor with me twice before I got tired and moved on to something else. Not exactly tenacious, I realize, but when all other battles to that point had been trivial it hardly seems like the game was preparing me for what was to come. In a broader scope, I’m not exactly thrilled with this game but my random 100 point rental requirement dictates that I ought to push through for a couple more chapters to get the first (100 point) achievement. I think at this juncture I’ve had the game long enough I should get something out of it, but it’s not exactly a title I’m going to drop on my “must buy” list.
- Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: I finally got my second pendant and the flippers. I note that part of the problem with playing older games like this in a portable format is that I can’t keep all the little nuances in my head the way I might if I were dedicated to playing this on a home console. I treat portable games, no matter what they are, more or less like quick-play games. Perhaps that’s why I never got into FFIII and why it’s taking me so long to finish up Phoenix Wright. I think it’s safe to say now that I love this game and it needs to replace the original on my Top 30 list. But I’ll finish it first, just to say I did it. And because I want to.